Sydney J Harris Inspirational Quotes (106)

Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.

People decline invitations when they are indisposed physically, and I wish they would do likewise when they feel indisposed emotionally. A person has no more right to attend a party with a head full of venom than with a throat full of virus.

If you cannot endure to be thought in the wrong, you will begin to do terrible things to make the wrong appear right.

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

We truly possess only what we are able to renounce otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

Many people know how to work hard many others know how to play well but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure.